Lyr Add: The Dead (Rupert Brooke)

Subject: Lyr Add: THE DEAD (Rupert Brooke)
From: Amos
Date: 11 Apr 03 - 11:14 PM

There are lessons that we have heard taught time and time again, which tell us that war is insane. For reasons I won't go in to, the lesson does not seem to stick very well.

In 1915, the English poet Rupert Brooke died (not of violence but of blood poisoning) while in service with the British Navy en route to Gallipoli.

His acknowledgement of the dead of war is appropriate to remember as we walk away from our own, and those we killed, in a war widely promoted as just:

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THE DEAD

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.

Rupert Brooke

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Subject: RE: Song for the Recently Dead
From: michaelr
Date: 11 Apr 03 - 11:30 PM

Beautiful, Amos. Thank you.

Michael

Subject: RE: Song for the Recently Dead
From: Peg
Date: 12 Apr 03 - 01:17 AM

beautiful, Amos; and appropriate for any who have passed.

Subject: RE: Song for the Recently Dead
From: alanabit
Date: 12 Apr 03 - 02:57 AM

Thanks. I grew up watching films in which Germans were just grey clothed monsters to be mown down. It is ironic now, because in the kitchen at the moment, Ina, Merle(7),and Jonah(4) - my three most important people in the world - are having breakfast. They are all German. Oddly enough, my father, a very unsentimental man, quoted Brooke's most famous sonnet "The Soldier" on his deathbed last year. I am not a pacifist (a visit to a former concentration camp changed my mind about that), but we should never go to war lightly.

Subject: RE: Song for the Recently Dead
From: GUEST
Date: 12 Apr 03 - 08:01 AM

Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen

Subject: RE: Song for the Recently Dead
From: Amos
Date: 12 Apr 03 - 10:54 AM

Interesting that Owen and Brook both wrote on the 1sr WW. The Second produced even worse horrors, and less poetry.

War is an insanity.

I am not an absolute pacifist either -- sometimes it is the lesser of two insanities. That doesn't make it any less insane.   

A

Subject: RE: Song for the Recently Dead
From: Amos
Date: 12 Apr 03 - 06:03 PM

The order of business throughout Iraq is still burying the dead, both for families who have lost their children, husbands, or wives, and communities who have lost their working organizations and their known methods of survival.

My wish for Iraq is a long period free of war, where lives can be lived to their fullest making things better.

A